Fridge / Justice League S 1 E 18 And 19 Legends

• Fridge Brilliance: The episode aired in 2002, while the nuclear war that destroyed the Justice Guild's Earth happened "forty years ago." Assuming the episode is set in the year it aired, that aligns pretty perfectly for the Cuban Missile Crisis to have occurred forty years prior.
  • Also, it makes sense for Ray Thompson to use his Reality Warping powers to recreate the Justice Guild and his old world instead of using them to help the other survivors rebuild their world. He was just a kid who was probably the mascot of the Justice Guild, he’d lost them in a nuclear war that traumatized him both physically (through Body Horror) and emotionally. Re-creating his old world and bringing his heroes back was probably the ultimate wish fulfillment for him, and he wasn’t mature or sane enough to realize that he was in the wrong.
  • After the Justice League and the Justice Guild introduce themselves, J’onn suddenly feels dizzy. The most likely explanation, given what we later learn, is that J’onn was picking up a psychic impression that made him feel dizzy — like the first one he had which nearly made him pass out due to it being a nuclear explosion, and the third one, where he is trying to help capture Sportsman, and which causes him to fall to the ground. And who was around in the second and third examples of mysterious illness? Ray Thompson! It’s likely that J’onn picked up Ray’s awareness of what his world really was like and that was what led J’onn to identify Ray as the source of the illusion that the world was not a devastated landscape!
• Fridge Logic: Why did Hawkgirl immediately assume that it was the heroes that were fake, rather than the graves?
  • Because they were already beginning to notice something was off about the place; only two of the same cops show up at scenes of crime, ice cream truck drives all around the city but never stops, and any time someone starts asking sensitive questions an incident occurs to distract everyone.
  • And what would be the point of fake graves anyway? Not only were the grave markers overgrown, but having them be fake graves of the entire Justice Guild would only end up drawing a lot of attention and suspicion anyways, something that Ray wouldn't want to happen given the circumstances. It would make absolutely no sense to attempt to fool the Justice League this way.
• Fridge Horror/ Fridge Sadness: Those people have been trapped in the ruins of Seaboard city for decades. Even not factoring the sheer psychological trauma they've all suffered, what if there are other survivors who lived outside of Ray's sphere of influence? The world has potentially moved on from the entire city, and they're stuck having to pick up the pieces in a world that might be very different from what they once knew. All because one super-powered broken child couldn't let go.

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